Whatever one thinks of propaganda about 'free trade' or actual practice of 'free trade,' politics organized mainly around opposing 'free trade' seems to consist of strange bedfellows, many of whom are downright reactionary, in the United States. Populism doesn't work here. (It may work elsewhere, depending on its content.) Encouraging right-wing populists at a time when many of us expect spectacular effects of global deflation--not to mention a possibility of collapse--at the heart of imperialism doesn't sound like a great idea to me.
>What free trade has done for the Third World is to pop up corrupt
>governments, abuse the environment and lift a small part of Third World
>labor from desperate poverty to statsitical poverty. It also
>neutralizes scial and political pressure for national development.
>I know that the "better than nothing" arugment of neo-liberals like
>DeLong.
>Sometimes, "nothing" is better than disguised slavery.
>A total collapse of free trade would be a very progressive development.
Are you also against the emigration of the Third World people and people of formerly socialist countries into the USA and other core states, which also does a whole lot to 'neutralizes social and political pressures for national development' at the periphery, via brain drains (i.e. of discontented intellectuals who could have become leaders), money sent back home by emigrants that alleviates deprivation, etc.?
Yoshie